After election, will Sri Lanka improve press record?

Sri Lanka’s Department of Elections today
declared incumbent Mahinda Rajapaksa the winner of the presidential election with almost 58
percent of the vote. The situation is still tense as his opponent, former Gen.
Sarath Fonseka, threatens a lawsuit to challenge the entire process, from voter
access to irregularities in computer counting, to name just two aspects.
Fonseka remains sequestered in the Cinnamon Lakeside Hotel in Colombo, where he and his political allies gathered
as the results were tallied. Some Sri Lankan media say Fonseka is claiming there
is a plot
to assassinate him. Soon after he announced the results of the voting, Elections
Commissioner Dayananda Dissanayake said he wanted to resign. He told
reporters he is no longer able to bear the pressure imposed by various parties.

Among media professionals, there
is plenty of tension. During the campaign, news media pretty much took sides in
supporting either Rajapaksa or Fonseka. There was little middle ground in the coverage.
Rajapaksa’s opponents note that state-controlled media were blatantly and
illegally pressed into the incumbent’s political service.

We’ve documented one apparent attack
on a journalist during the campaign, along with some online censorship. A
pro-Fonseka journalist, Prageeth
Eknelygoda, a political reporter for the Sri Lankan news Web siteLanka
eNews, remains missing after disappearing on January 24. “I fear
he has been abducted,” one Sri Lankan journalist wrote me the day after Eknelygoda
went missing. On Tuesday, we reported that several
Web sites were shut down, apparently on orders of the government, while the
voting was under way.

I stayed up late communicating with Sri Lankan journalists and
other sources, most of them texting on phones, and monitoring Twitter. Here is a typical
quote from a journalist whose judgment I have grown to trust over the years. (I’m
not going to identify sources because of the ongoing threat to journalists.) “It
is widely believed the margin of victory is too large, and rigging of the computer
tally is suspected. Bitterly fought election, so reprisals expected even with
those in media.”

That is an issue on the minds of many journalists with whom
I’ve been communicating today. Will Sri Lanka’s long suffering media face
a storm of retribution now that the election has passed?

It doesn’t have to be that way, although the indicators are mixed:
Sri Lanka
ended its decades of warfare with Tamil secessionists last year, although many Tamils
continue to suffer in its aftermath. It has just voted in an administration, although
there is a possible legal challenge. The country is caught in a severe economic
slump, in part tied to the war and in part tied to the global economic crisis.
Diplomatic and trade pressure to reverse the repressive trends of the past five
years is mounting; the European Union has put on hold a decision to extend a preferential
trade and tariff agreement (called GSP+) that Sri Lanka needs to keep its
clothing export industry thriving. In the United States,
the Obama administration appears to be taking a new approach to countries like Sri Lanka,
looking for leverage and influence but taking a less confrontational line.
Before the stock market closed in Colombo on
Tuesday afternoon, Sri Lanka stocks rose slightly; analysts
said it was because of a “positive sentiment” among investors.

One,
worrisome trend was the participation during the campaign of ranking military
officers in TV political shows. They were there not because a colleague was
running for the presidency, but because the military has become politicized to
a degree not seen before in Sri
Lanka, a 61-year-old developing country that
has never had a military coup.

The partisanship shown in the media during the campaign is
nothing new to the country; partisan journalism is part of the country’s
decades-old media culture, as much a product of its colonial heritage as its
public schools and parliamentary form of government.

Certainly the Rajapaksa government can learn to live within this
culture. Violence against journalists, which spiked during the Rajapaksa
administration’s all-out push to defeat the Tamil secessionists, can be reined
in. The government can start to reverse the history of impunity in attacks on journalists,
a record we documented in our 2009 report “Failure
to Investigate.”

No one I’ve spoken with knows what will come next. Most,
though not all, are fearful. Some have gone into hiding. At best, journalists
outside the pro-government media are taking an anxious, wait-and-see attitude,

Bob Dietz, coordinator of CPJ’s Asia Program, has reported across the continent for news outlets such as CNN and Asiaweek. He has led numerous CPJ missions, including ones to Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka. Follow him on Twitter @cpjasia and Facebook @ CPJ Asia Desk.

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